Adventures in academia

Absent-minded professors and ivory towers star in campus novel genre

Egghead elitists. Haughty highbrows. Pointy-headed pundits. These are among the epithets hurled at academics, who evoke ready-made images of absent-minded professors living in ivory towers while remaining clueless about the real world.

I was once one of them, and I'll admit there's a grain of truth in such caricatures - at least as applied to some of my former colleagues.

But even the most dedicated scholars don't live in a library, and the disconnect between impossibly high-minded visions of the quest for knowledge and the inevitably earthy compromises of everyday life can be extremely funny and unbearably sad - in ways we all recognize from our own lives, regardless of who we are or what we do.

It's therefore little wonder that a distinct genre of campus novels has flourished since the 1950s. You don't need to be a professor to appreciate them - any more than you need to be a lawyer to enjoy novels about the law. The best novels always reach beyond their ostensible setting, and the best campus novels are no exception.

In the beginning

The campus novel took off following World War II, as college enrollments skyrocketed. Three remarkable novels, each one unique, got the ball rolling.

C.P. Snow was first with "The Masters" (1951). Set in England at Cambridge, its focus is the 13 fellows who must pick a new Master to lead their college.

Snow's description of each fellow is nuanced and psychologically acute, and his account of their often prickly personalities, paranoid tendencies and shifting allegiances will ring true for anyone who has ever been enmeshed in office intrigue.

But "The Masters" also repeatedly idealizes its cloistered university setting as one that can contain the interpersonal conflicts it describes. One never doubts that these gents eventually will shake hands, pass the decanter and toast the institution they love.

Set in 1937, "The Masters" looks back nostalgically toward a world that vanished during World War II. The year after it appeared, the always feisty Mary McCarthy published "The Groves of Academe" (1952), which showed little reverence for the professors at fictional Jocelyn College, a progressive liberal arts school in east-central Pennsylvania.

Taking place during the height of the Red Scare in the early 1950s, the central figure in "Groves" is Henry Mulcahy, a Joyce scholar who has bounced around because of his difficult personality, lousy teaching, failure to publish and left-wing politics.

Jocelyn takes him in when its president, himself a onetime radical, decides to cut Mulcahy a break, willingly overlooking his deficiencies as a professor and hoping that a fresh start will jumpstart his stalled career.

Big mistake. When budget cuts threaten Mulcahy's position, he uses every page in the Joe McCarthy (no relation) playbook to frame the president as an enemy of academic freedom, supposedly out to ruin Mulcahy because of Mulcahy's suspected ties to the Communist Party.

In the process, "Groves" demonstrates how vulnerable liberalism is to demagogues from the left as well as the right - not only revealing why American universities knuckled under during the Red Scare, but also anticipating the politically correct orthodoxy that would sweep campuses in the decades to come.

All of McCarthy's characters talk brilliantly - too brilliantly, at times, to be believable. "Groves" can sound like a Socratic dialogue rather than a novel, but the conversation is so good that you're not likely to care.

There is nothing Socratic about "Lucky Jim" (1954), Kingsley Amis' first novel. Jim Dixon is a history lecturer in a provincial college who has little patience for the "niggling mindlessness" of academic research involving a "funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts" shedding "pseudo-light" upon "non-problems."

Jim's specialty is the Middle Ages, but as he notes early in the novel, "we all specialize in what we hate most." Jim seems to hate almost everything associated with his academic life, including the pedantic history professor who controls his future and the female lecturer who has ensnared him in a seemingly hopeless relationship.

Fortune smiles on Jim in the end, but only because he finally lights out for a non-academic career in London, having first entertained us with more than 200 pages of nonstop, very funny satire on the life he leaves behind.

The world of David Lodge

In characteristically generous fashion, British writer David Lodge has described "Lucky Jim" as a "magic book for me," and Lodge has kept Amis' comic spirit alive in a number of campus novels, the best and funniest of which are "Changing Places" (1975) and its sequel, "Small World" (1984).

"Changing Places" begins with the following wonderful sentence: "High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour."

The professors, both 40, are Morris Zapp and Phillip Swallow, who are swapping roles for a semester as part of an exchange program involving Zapp's State University of Euphoria at Plotinus and Swallow's University of Rummidge.

Plotinus, across the bay from "the glittering, glamorous city of Esseph," is a thinly disguised Berkeley; dreary Rummidge is modeled on the University of Birmingham, where Lodge taught for 27 years.

Zapp is an academic superstar who publishes frequently but doesn't much care for literature. Swallow is a fussbudget who, "scarcely known outside his own Department," has published little but loves literature.

By novel's end, the men have not only traded countries, but also wives and large chunks of their respective personalities; Lodge's obvious model is Henry James, who wrote numerous novels exploring the relationship between England and America, and whom Lodge went on to commemorate in "Author, Author" (2004).

The satire in "Changing Places" is broad and gentle; one almost wishes that Lodge's comedy had harnessed more of Amis' savage energy. But Lodge is clearly having a good time telling his story, and "Changing Places" is a fun - even joyful - book to read.

By the time of "Small World," Zapp is confidently proclaiming that "the single, static campus is over." "Scholars these days," he continues, "are like the errant knights of old, wandering the ways of the world in search of adventure and glory."

And in search of sexy women - like Angelica, the beautiful, elusive graduate student who is pursued by young English professor Persse McGarrigle. Or sexy prizes, like the UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism that Zapp covets, with its hefty salary, generous travel allowance, and waiver of any requirement to teach students or grade papers.

There are quests galore in "Small World," as jet-setting academics embody the meaning of desire itself, that insatiable search for more - sex, power, prestige, you name it - in a world where enough is never enough. "Small World" is a campus novel on steroids; it has slipped its moorings to explore the wider world beyond the ivy-clad walls.

Only connect: Jane Smiley and Zadie Smith

In a recent e-mail exchange, Jane Smiley singled out "Small World" as a "great inspiration" in writing her own campus novel, "Moo" (1995). "I was teaching at Iowa State at the time," Smiley wrote, and the campus novel "was such a ripe subject that I couldn't resist."

Smiley added that "Moo" "is one of my favorites of my own books." It is also one of the best campus novels, successfully integrating a large Midwestern university and the surrounding community while managing a dizzying number of subplots.

"Moo" has a huge cast that includes professors, students and administrators as well as secretaries, cafeteria workers, a shady Texas billionaire and - most famously - a pig named Earl. Incredibly, Smiley gives each of them - and I really do mean each of them, including Earl - enough face time to come to life.

There are plenty of dark clouds hovering above Moo U., involving penny-pinching politicians, the privatization of the university, dubious cloning experiments, the destruction of a rain forest and racial prejudice. There's also a truckload of the petty intrigues and backbiting that are a staple in every campus novel.

But "Moo" never loses its good-hearted empathy for its characters, and even the most noxious of them - an economics professor whose two great loves are the free market and himself - comes across as fatuous rather than evil.

It's no accident that "Moo" is structured in five parts and ends with a wedding, because it reads like a great Shakespearean comedy: wise, accepting and affirming.

The same goes for Zadie Smith's "On Beauty" (2005), which unfolds on the campus of fictional Wellington College, a thinly disguised Harvard.

"On Beauty" revolves around the families of academic rivals Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps. Howard comes from England and is white, working class and radical; Monty comes from Trinidad and is black, rich and conservative.

Neither man is easy to love; both are self-involved and both cheat on their long-suffering wives. But while Smith doesn't excuse their conduct - and while she has her share of fun with academics and their petty foibles - she is as intent as Smiley on demanding more than just satire, from both herself and the campus novel.

Smith's inspiration, openly professed in her acknowledgments, is E.M. Forster and his novel "Howard's End" (1910), in which two very different families come together and eventually learn to love one another - largely because Forster himself is so generous, and so willing to forgive their many faults.

Smith displays similar generosity - not just toward the Belsey and Kipps families, but also toward the campus novel; she clearly believes that all three can grow.

It is no accident that the final, moving scene in "On Beauty" takes place in a classroom, where a beleaguered Howard - recently separated from his wife and soon to lose his job - is giving a lecture to showcase his talents for prospective employers.

I'm not telling you what happens, but I defy you to read it and remain unmoved, which suggests in turn that the classroom still has a great deal to offer - not only to teachers and their students, but also to writers and their readers.

***

The reading list

If you want to ace the exam on campus novels, here are 10 more that you should read, listed in chronological order:

Randall Jarrell, "Pictures from an Institution" (1954). A witty satire - less a novel than a series of snapshots - tracing a year at a progressive woman's college and featuring a female novelist bearing an uncanny resemblance to Mary McCarthy.

Alison Lurie, "The War Between the Tates" (1974). The best exploration in a campus novel of the thankless role of faculty wife - particularly when her husband is sleeping with the students.

Malcolm Bradbury, "The History Man" (1975). There are no limits - sexual or political - for English sociology professor Howard Kirk and his wife, Barbara. A dark look at the psychic cost of an academic environment that confuses indulgence with freedom.

Don DeLillo, "White Noise" (1985). DeLillo's best-known book takes us to College-on-the-Hill, where Jack Gladney chairs the department of Hitler studies. A devastating indictment of what happens when even the exotic becomes commonplace - and when our freedom to choose anything devalues everything.

Carol Shields, "Swann" (1987). The fictional Mary Swann was an abused Canadian housewife who also wrote poetry, which becomes another carcass for academics to pick over once it is rediscovered by Sarah Maloney, a feminist English professor and Swann's champion.

A.S. Byatt, "Possession" (1990). A stunningly original and beautifully written story of two British academics whose own romance blooms while they reconstruct a secret love affair between two Victorian poets. Winner of the Man Booker prize.

Richard Russo, "Straight Man" (1997). Hank Devereaux is chair of a dysfunctional English department in a rural Pennsylvania college in this laugh-out-loud but also poignant account of a 49-year-old academic who long ago settled for less and now pines for more.

J.M. Coetzee, "Disgrace" (1999). Winner of the Man Booker prize, Coetzee's account of an aging professor who resigns following an affair with a student also explores how the changes sweeping post-apartheid South Africa affect those who have lost the power they once took for granted - in and out of the classroom.

Francine Prose, "Blue Angel" (2000). Prose's Vermont version of the classic Heinrich Mann novel features a creative writing teacher with a drinking problem and his infatuation with a student who has an agenda of her own. Among the best of the many recent novels skewering the politically correct campus.

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